More bailout stuff, skip if that makes you unhappy.

How did we get here? The economy is fantastically complicated beyond human comprehension, so we are forced to use heuristics to comprehend it. No amount of education can overcome this fact, which is why every economy professor is proposing a different solution; the education doesn't mean you actually understand, it "just" changes the heuristics.

My favorite heuristic for understanding the economy (and also a lot of business in general) is that people will do what they believe is best for them, based on their local comprehension of the situation, and that what other people intended for their local situation counts for nothing. Like many of my heuristics, this may sound blindingly obvious when stated baldly, but people clearly do not make economic predictions based on this. (By "people", I mean people in general. I don't know what economic professors base their predictions on.)

A bailout that does not remove the mandates that banks issue bad loans is worse than no bailout at all. It just guarantees that when this happens again, next time it'll be even bigger.

How about repealing the Community Reinvestment Act, at the very least pending an investigation?

How about instead of banning corporate parachutes, we ban subprime mortgages entirely? How about phasing in requirements for a 10% down payment, minimum? (And make these clauses airtight; I don't care how ethnic you are, pony up the dough or GTFO.) Both of these are actually fairly bad ideas for various reasons, but I think both would be better than this bill's policy of transfusing blood into a bleeding patient and declaring victory!

Michelle Malkin has the story behind the Palin email hack. (Warning: Link to Michelle Malkin, if you're sensitive about that. But the email quoted by that post is as close to primary source as I can get.)

In summary, Palin's email account was hacked by exploiting the fact that Palin's answers to the security questions that allow a user to reset their password could be even-more-easily-than-usually guessed by accessing public information, which then permitted full access to her account.

I wanted to discuss this situation from a computer security point of view, because there's a lot of interesting stuff going on in this example.

Swoopo, which I refuse to link to, is one amazingly evil site. It is an auction site (for some loose definition of the word "auction") that works as follows:

• A mark registers for the site and buys "bids" for $1 each.
• The site puts an item up for auction, starting the price at 15 cents.
• The marks take turns "bidding". Each bid makes them the auction's current winner, costs them one "bid", raises the price by 15 cents, and bumps the timer up if it's close to the end. Whoever has the winning "bid" by the time the auction expires gets the item.

The auction timer ends up being pretty pointless as it gets bumped up endlessly; an action really ends when the marks stop bidding.

Garret, I know you generally dislike pictures using HDR photography, but there is certainly a time and a place for it.

By popular demand ("this one guy asked for it once"), I've added a post index to iRi. (Also, Google has lost a lot of my pages, which sucks mostly because I keep trying to use it on my own site.)

I tried to implement something like Amazon's Statistically Improbable Phrases, which take characteristic phrases out of books and works pretty well, but my corpus is too small. There are many words I use only once, and the vast majority of two-word phrases are entirely unique. Consequently, I use only single words, and even that works poorly.

I didn't notice this reddit link go by last month, since I don't check my referrers as often as I used to (heh), linking to my post about teaching things other than trig.

All in all, I feel like I fared well for a site like Reddit, but there was one repeated theme in the comments I wanted to address: The idea that economics would be impossible to teach in high school. The argument was that economics is hard in the sense that true understanding requires advanced math, that economics is controversial in the sense that there is no one accepted theory of economics, and that having a partial understanding of economics could even be worse than no understanding at all in some cases.

Following up on my "failed predictions" point, I point at the now widely-distributed article about the low-fat vs. low-carb diets.

The standard dietary orthodoxy predicts that the results of this study would be exactly the opposite of what happened. The predictions are wrong. Therefore, the standard model is wrong. I don't need to be a nutritionist to make this determination.

I don't know what the right model is. I think that's pretty sad, considering that if nutritionists hadn't gotten bogged down by a premature orthodoxy, we would probably be now in the position of refining a solid idea, instead of where we really are now, which is quite nearly square one.

Over the past couple of years, I've been turning into a skeptic on the global warming theory, in particular the idea that mankind's actions have effectively doomed us to an uncomfortably hot planet (since the putatively required solutions are all completely unimplementable).

I will grant that my politics would seem to incline me to such skepticism, but I try to decide based on the science, not the politics. If the world truly is heading for disaster, I want to know.

It is very hard to judge a science that you have no experience in, but there is one metric that you can correctly use as an educated outsider to determine whether a scientist is on the right track or the wrong track: the accuracy of predictions. If a prediction is correctly made, it favors a theory, proportionally to the difficulty of the prediction. If the prediction is wrong, it is very solid evidence that the theory or model is wrong. This judgment can be often be made by anybody, especially when it's a question of something simple like temperature.

Slashdot has an unusually interesting discussion on the rise and fall of CAPTCHAs, which is why I give that link precedence over the original story.

I mention this because I keep waiting for someone to discuss the root problem, and it's so rarely done that I guess I'm just going to have to do it myself. The root problem of spam comes from the following simple tension:

1. We want to be able to contact or be contacted by anybody.
2. We don't want to be contacted by just anybody.

Without understanding this fundamental dynamic, the whole "spam" situation won't make any sense.